venessa miemis

her post here   on the contact speakers

Patrick Meier:

Re:publica 2011: Changing the World, One Map at a Time

View more presentations from Patrick Meier

Adam Fisk:
Social technologies can clearly strengthen the social fabric, particularly strengthening weak ties, but there’s a sexy and glamorous element to it I find misleading and distracting. E-mail, the cell phone, and television are probably still the most powerful “social technologies,” but no one talks about them because they don’t grab the headlines in the same way as Twitter and Facebook. Al Jazeera was far more important than Twitter and Facebook in helping spark the recent uprisings across the Near East in my view, and I’ve never seen an analysis of the role of the cell phone in organizing the protests. My guess is that it was orders of magnitude more important than Twitter. This is especially clear in countries like Yemen where around 2% of the population has access to the Internet.
What drives you to do this work?
I’ve always felt that many of the world’s problems are due to a lack of awareness — the result of miscommunication at a basic level. I also feel strongly that decentralized networks are generally more robust and healthier than centralized ones because they make it harder to constrain and control communication. To me, P2P is largely about removing concentrations of power and points of control, freeing data to flow more freely.